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A memory of Jimi Hendrix in London
In an excerpt from his memoir, Christopher McHale remembers the first time he saw Jimi Hendrix in a small club called the Speakeasy.
I’m not entirely sure what is happening around me. And I’m not sure it even matters if I did. Things happened, and you navigated them with character or without. You take the consequences of it and that’s what we call growing up. I found myself in foreign cities from morning to night. They talk about the consequence of such a life for a child. I’ve even had a woman from the State Department call me to check in. She said her name was Dr. Something. The doctor is all I remember. She said there is a dislocation that accompanies being raised in foreign cities from an early age. She had quite a lot to say about it, but I didn’t believe her then. I loved my foreign city life. Still, looking back, she wasn’t wrong.
What I learned a million miles later is another thing about this dislocation she spoke of. A more important sense of it. A key to who I was and what I sought. A sense of the sacred.
One night, I take my friend Bob out for a night of music. Living in central London made me an authority on the place. I knew my way around, you might say. I walked the streets, and rode my bicycle through the streets, and rode the…
